After these general remarks on the variety and exuberance of tropical vegetation, I shall now briefly notice those plants which, by their enormous size, their singularity of form, or their frequency in the landscape, chiefly characterise the various regions of the torrid zone. The African Baobab, or monkey-bread tree (_Adansonia digitata_), may justly be called the elephant of the vegetable world. Near the village Gumer, in Fassokl, Russegger saw a baobab thirty feet in diameter and ninety-five in circumference; the horizontally outstretched branches were so large that the negroes could comfortably sleep upon them. The Venetian traveller Cadamosto (1454) found, near the mouths of the Senegal, baobabs measuring more than a hundred feet in circumference. As these vegetable giants are generally hollow, like our ancient willows, they are frequently made use of as dwellings or stables; and Dr. Livingstone mentions one in which twenty or thirty men could lie down and sleep, as in a hut. In the village of Grand Galarques, in Senegambia, the negroes have decorated the entrance into the cavity of a monstrous baobab with rude sculptures cut into the living wood, and make use of the interior as a kind of assembly room, where they meet to deliberate on the interests of their small community, ‘reminding one,’ says Humboldt, ‘of the celebrated plantain in Lycia, in whose hollow trunk the Roman consul, Lucinius Mutianus, once dined with a party of twenty-one.’ As the baobab begins to decay in the part where the trunk divides into the larger branches, and the process of destruction thence continues downwards, the hollow space fills, during the rainy season, with water, which keeps a long time, from its being protected against the rays of the sun. The baobab thus forms a _vegetable cistern_, whose water the neighbouring villagers sell to travellers. In Kordofan the Arabs climb upon the tree, fill the water in leathern buckets, and let it down from above; but the people in Congo more ingeniously bore a hole in the trunk, which they stop, after having tapped as much as they require.[11] The height of the baobab does not correspond to its amazing bulk, as it seldom exceeds sixty feet. As it is of very rapid growth, it acquires a diameter of three or four feet and its full altitude in about thirty years, and then continues to grow in circumference. The larger beam-like branches, almost as thick at their extremity as at their origin, are abruptly rounded, and then send forth smaller branches, with large, light green, palmated leaves. The bark is smooth and greyish. The oval fruits, which are of the size of large cucumbers, and brownish-yellow when ripe, hang from long twisted spongy stalks, and contain a white farinaceous substance, of an agreeable acidulated taste, enveloping the dark brown seeds. They are a favourite food of the monkeys, whence the tree has derived one of its names.